I didn’t realize how tense I had gotten, physically, while watching Martha Marcy May Marlene until that last black screen. What an outstanding slow build of “can’t look”/”can’t look away” — you’d think the inciting …

I have no idea what the movie is trying to do. I only know that it fails on almost every level save the acting, and even that isn’t great; it’s merely not as disastrous as …

The specific buzz around Shame, and Michael Fassbender’s performance, did not fill me with anticipation. Sometimes, when a performance is repeatedly called brave or groundbreaking, the distinction between the bravery or originality of the performance …

It has all the tools for a great movie: a good old-fashioned ’70s-Cold-War-paranoia plot; a roster of fantastic actors and Hey, It’s That Guys, including Colin Firth, Ciaran Hinds, John Hurt, and the dude who …

Watching a lot of movies in a row can scramble the brain, but it can also let those movies reflect on and inform one another. For example, the Oscars Death Race is a time of …

A one-star reviewer of Meek’s Cutoff on the IMDb complained that there’s no dialogue for the first 15 minutes. This is one of the many things I liked about the movie. These people have gotten …

Richard Press’s documentary about Times Styles photographer, and chance fashion-world icon, Bill Cunningham, keeps it light for the first hour. The tone is the gently knowing one of PBS specials about James-Cameronian construction projects of …

This is probably the Terrence Malick movie for people who hate Terrence Malick. I do not hate Terrence Malick; I find his work fascinating (with one exception, The Thin Red Line, which I have now …

I don’t entirely disagree with Roger Ebert’s assessment, in his review of The Debt, that “the film jumps the rails towards the end.” The last sequence is highly unbelievable on several levels — the timing; …

Words are a fucking nightmare when it comes to closeness, often. … Words became the enemy. — Stephanie LaFarge
Project Nim tells the frustrating story of Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee taken from his mother as an …